The ability to obtain large quantities of thigh meat from slaughtered animals, such as poultry or fowl, by mechanical means is of great importance to world food production. It is not uncommon in the food industry, for instance, that well over a hundred thousand slaughtered birds are processed in one day's shift at a poultry processing plant.
Various methods and apparatuses have been developed for removing thigh meat from thigh bones or femurs of poultry and fowl as thighs are moved along a processing path or cut-up line. Generally, cut-up lines for bird carcasses can operate at high capacity, and suspend the carcasses by their ankle joints from shackles. As a result, the legs and thighs are commonly amongst the last items to be processed. This manner of suspension and order of processing is not always ideal in getting the best yield of meat and in preventing contamination of recovered meat by bone fragments. It has therefore become increasingly popular to process thigh meat separately from the traditional cut-up lines, at the disadvantage of having to collect the yet unprocessed thighs and convey and feed these one by one to a dedicated processing device. Part of this drawback has been overcome in that one or a plurality of such thigh processing devices can be operated simultaneous with an associated a cut-up line. Such dedicated thigh deboning devices, as disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 3,510,908, often rely on manual labor, can be cumbersome to operate, and do little if anything to increase processing speed.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus for deboning animal thighs for separating and collecting meat from the thigh bone. In a more general sense there is a need to overcome or ameliorate at least one of the disadvantages of the prior art. There is an overall need to provide alternative structures that are less cumbersome in assembly and operation and that moreover can be made relatively inexpensively. Alternatively a need exists at least to provide the public with a useful choice. It is to the provision of a method and apparatus that meets these and other needs that the present disclosure is primarily directed.